In technology, owning the platform often means owning the customer, hence the race to offer free APIs, tools, and even applications and operating systems.

The latest firms to attempt this trick are Google and Facebook. Google is giving away an API and tools to lure developers into writing programs that run across multiple social networks, thus saving them the bother of having to rewrite applications. It is also the ultimate freebie provider, giving away email, productivity applications, blogs, picture storage and other web-based services. Similarly, it opens up its own programs for third parties to plug in capabilities.

Facebook is also opening up its popular social network to let others write programs, thus trading in its own customer reach to gain speed to market and breadth of applications.

Platform building is often subject to failures of trust between partners but, when successful, as in the case of Microsoft, these efforts provide attractive ecosystems and era-defining changes in power.